The present invention relates in general to video surveillance systems, and, more specifically, to streaming video content over a wireless network using a transmission protocol that does not guarantee delivery of data while ensuring availability of a high quality video signal at the remote site.
Multimedia streaming applications over packet-based networks often use real-time protocol (RTP) to transmit the multimedia content. RTP utilizes the user datagram protocol (UDP) as its transport layer protocol. UDP is not a reliable transport protocol (i.e., delivery of any particular packet within a stream is not guaranteed).
In order to reduce bandwidth requirements, multimedia content is typically compressed before it is transmitted over IP networks. Compressed video streaming over wireless networks (such as EVDO, WiMAX, or LTE) is subject to transmission errors that can result in lost or corrupted RTP packets in the data stream, potentially degrading the quality of the multimedia content reproduced at the receiving end. Because of compression, severe loss of quality can result even in the case of moderately low video frame losses, for example.
For some video streaming applications such as social networking or video chatting, the potentially degraded video quality may be acceptable. However, other applications such as video surveillance for safety monitoring and law enforcement purposes rely on the ability to accurately record and reproduce the video signal captured by a camera at the surveillance location. Even occasional degradation of the video quality may not be acceptable, especially when the video is used for conducting investigations.